BP 169
Simply said, God created us for relationship with Him, other people, and our own hearts. Love and intimacy are the reason we have appeared in this universe.
But The Tragic Fall in that perfect garden known as Eden burned all our bridges of connection–obliterated them. So, unless something (Someone) intervenes in our lives and reconciles us to God and one another, we are born into this world with the original blueprint of love and intimacy etched onto the walls of our hearts but incapable of building the designed bridges. Resistance to closeness, rebellion against authority, an inborn bent to hide, and an inability to love all prevent us from crying out to God and others for help.
The purpose of this post is to consider some of the factors that persist in undermining our original created design as creatures made for relationship with God, others, and oneself. So, what are some of these obstacles to “withness”? I have listed a few below:
+ The deepest fault in human infrastructure is the desire to turn away from God and make ourselves God. We have in us an innate desire to not let God be God but to usurp godship for ourselves. So much for intimacy with the Creator. We make up the rules we want and pretend like the sovereign God does not exist!
+ We want to maintain distance (be separate) from God and others because we fear people will see us for who we are and reject us if they actually get to know us.
+ We keep ourselves at arm’s length because we don’t want to need others. Neediness is weak, pathetic, certainly not for the masculine race.
+ We do not want to get too close to others because then we will be accountable to them and will see that we are called to obey God.
+ True love means we need to sacrifice, serve, forgive, put others before us, and die to self. Our flesh desires none of these acts of agape love.
+ We feel compelled to conceal the accusing shame that lingers in our soul even after our names are written in the book of life.
+ We are afraid of making a mess of our relationships if we are emotionally honest. Anger especially is a tricky emotion to express healthily and receive without defensiveness. It is safer to swallow emotions or to cut off relationships that wound us or frustrate us.
+ Related to the reason above is that some of us hate conflict. Tension with others must be avoided at all costs.
+ We don’t want to hurt others. We may have come to believe (99% of the time this belief is a lie or an accusation) in childhood that we were responsible for the tears, anger, and shameful reactions of parents or others around us and so we decided to never hurt anyone. Who wants to see their mother (or father) cry or withdraw like a wounded animal?
+ We want to merge with others instead of to be separate persons. As Irving Yalom said in Love’s Executioner, “One’s efforts to escape isolation can sabotage one’s relationships with other people. Many a friendship or marriage has failed because, instead of relating to, and caring for, one another, one person uses another as a shield against isolation.”
Yalom goes on to write, “A common, and vigorous, attempt to solve existential isolation . . . is fusion—the softening of one’s boundaries, the melting into another . . . Fusion eradicates anxiety in a radical fashion—by eliminating self-awareness . . . Thus one sheds anxiety but loses oneself . . . Beware of the powerful exclusive attachment to another; it is not, as people sometimes think, evidence of the purity of the love.”
In other words, deep attachment to another person is not always healthy love but a way to become one with someone else so we don’t have to look inside and grow. It also leads not to mature interdependence but a dependence that keeps us from separating in a healthy way so we can be connected in a mature way. God’s designed separation does not leave a person alone but causes us to grow so we can love like an adult. Merging involves taking from others instead of giving to others. Any giving that is done expects a quid pro quo.
+ We don’t really love the other person, but we love what they do for us, how they make us feel, how they idealize us and make us feel seen and worthy. We are not in a selfless relationship but a selfish relationship.
+ We are entitled people who assume that others should give us what we want. It’s almost like they owe us.
+ If we do not avoid the passions of our flesh that wage war against our souls, we can travel through life loving something instead of someone. Lust, evil desire, fleshly passions do not love the person but love how the other person pleasures us.
+ We are bitter toward someone who has hurt us and respond with a stiff arm and a cold shoulder.
+ We passive aggressively express our anger and hurt by retreating from others and building a wall around our hearts.
+ In the spirit of the Well, the Leakage, and the Volcano, we move away from people or against them instead of toward them (speaking the truth in love).
+ As we have seen many times in other blog posts, Satan strives to steal intimacy, kill trust, and destroy love. He wants to divide and conquer and separate us from God and others.
All the above are obstacles to “withness”, to the intimacy God created us to experience. Do you see why loving relationships are the exception and not the rule?
Even as born-again believers, as new creations in Christ, we struggle to get close enough to know God, others, and our own selves. Why? Because, as we saw in the list above, we still have the flesh in us that fell with Adam and Eve.
Relationships do not just happen. You must remove all the above obstacles that rise up between you and God, you and other humans, you and your own soul. Will you do the hard work of intimacy, or will you spend your years living with a dog, playing video games, settling for the counterfeit “intimacy” of pornography, complaining about your aloneness as if it is being visited specially on you, or believing that it is just fine to love God but not learn how to pursue and love people?
Once again, the best way to replace the counterfeits is to learn (practice) deeper affections for the true loves in life. You know–love God and love your neighbor as yourself.
If you have some deep obstacle in your heart that may even be unidentified at this time but that creates distance between you and others, go see a therapist, a mentor, or a counseling pastor who loves Jesus and knows how to listen. By all means, seek others who can help you seek Jesus with all your heart and help you discover what fuels your resistance, your fear, or your sinful propensity for idols and counterfeits.
There is one last point I want to make here, maybe the most important one. Satan desires deadly separation, but God desires healthy separation. Satan strives for the separation that creates a damning distance between us and God, us and others, us and our own hearts.
God desires a different type of separation related to the merger and fusion mentioned above by Irving Yalom. God knows that humans are capable of merging with others so that they can then blame the other person for their own faults or because dependency means that the person does not have to grow or take responsibility for his or her own actions or because a person will then be merged with someone else and never have to be alone enough to look inside and see the darkness that dwells there.
As was alluded to above, fusion, merger, dependence–whatever you want to call unhealthy oneness–means that a person will not be loving the other person–even God–but taking from them. They will never be mature enough to attain the ability to truly love another.
Know that God wants you to be in that mystical union called being “in Christ”. But the only way that can most healthily happen at the optimum level is for you to look inside, to open your heart and grow, to take responsibility for your own actions, and to learn to love God and others instead of expecting them to serve you and take care of you. We identify these characteristics that come with godly growth with words such as humility, repentance, and servanthood. None of these are cultivated well in the human who desires merger but will only occur when someone is separate enough from others to look inside and examine himself or herself under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
So, be sure to identify the isolating separation driven by Satan and your own flesh that wants to not depend on God but be a god unto himself or herself. This type of oneness is not about love and empathy and obedience but desires the other person to be an object that functions in the way the immature person wishes–almost like an infantile pacifier that comforts but needs nothing from the one who is sucking it.
Then, also identify the separation of godly growth that leads to mature self-examination, ownership of faults, and has space to love others since the juvenile goal is not simply to get love and caretaking for one’s own immature and self-centered soul.
When looking at separation and dependence, be nuanced. There is a healthy separation and an unhealthy one. One creates distance while the other promotes intimacy. There is a godly union and there is an ungodly one. One is all about love for others and intimate presence while the other is about self-love and shunning growth. There is a mature love that genuinely cares about the other person and a love that loves the other people as objects that give them what they want (vending machines) with no need for reciprocity unless it is built on the expectation of quid pro quo.
Do not avoid intimacy by being totally separate or by being totally merged. Both are synonymous with distance and ultimate aloneness. Either alternative can be a collusion with the darkness in the universe that wants you to die in exile from God and others. Instead, ask God to teach you how to be healthily close, how to genuinely love, how to move toward the One who said He would never leave you or forsake you!
When you become a new creation in Christ, you’re just beginning the journey of learning how to be in healthy, close relationships. Be teachable!
“12Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, 13bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. 14And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. 15And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. 16Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. 17And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” ~ Colossians 3
